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Leadership and Culture for Higher Safety Performance

Improving organizational health and safety is like motherhood. Everyone is in favor of it. Vision, values, and mission statements abound with warm words about its importance. Who doesn’t agree with slogans like “everyone going home safe and healthy every day”? Only the most twisted executive or manager wants to hurt anyone. Yet many organizations are […]

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Are You Ready for the Changing Workplace?

How are you incorporating social media into your workplace? Is your workplace attracting or repelling the next generation of workers? Are you engaging and retaining frontline team members through effective employer brand management? Are you living your brand from the inside out? Do you lead with What or even How and miss the energizing power […]

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Thoughts that Make You Go Hmmm on…”The Happiness Advantage” by Shawn Achor

“…positive psychology researchers finished a ‘meta-analysis,’ a study of nearly every scientific happiness study available — over 200 studies on 275,000 people worldwide… happiness leads to success in nearly every domain, including work, health, friendship, sociability, creativity, and energy.” “Data abounds showing that happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better […]

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Review of “The Happiness Advantage” by Shawn Achor

Up until the late nineties psychology was overly focused on the “sickness model” and treating mental illness. In The Happiness Advantage Shawn points out, “as late as 1998, there was a 17-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio of research in the field of psychology. In other words, for every one study about happiness and thriving there were 17 studies […]

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Vote for the World’s Top Leadership Gurus

Last spring I was pleasantly surprised to be included in the World’s Top 30 Leadership Gurus for 2011. It’s an honor to be included with the leadership leaders who have inspired and taught me such as Warren Bennis, Tom Peter, Ken Blanchard, Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, Marshall Goldsmith, and Rosebeth Moss Kanter. Voting is now […]

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Love is at the Heart of Strong Leadership

Looking beyond the commercialization of Valentine’s Day, it’s a great time to nurture our inner romantic and express gratitude for our loved ones. As I write I am listening to a randomized Beatles playlist. Of the nearly 200 songs on the list, “The Word” started playing as I began this blog post. Its opening lines […]

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Smartening Up: Boosting Emotional Intelligence

Like the debate on whether leaders are born or made, an early debate in the emerging Emotional Intelligence research was whether our EQ, like IQ, is fixed once we hit adulthood. The debate is over and the verdict is in: like building leadership or other forms of expertise, we can improve our EQ at any […]

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The Ten Things Managers Need to Know from “The Leader’s Digest”

It’s always very interesting to see what readers identify as the most significant messages in my books. Occasionally I wonder if they actually read the book I wrote. Maybe they mixed it up with another one? But most often I am pleasantly surprised at what a reader has learned from the book. Through the power […]

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Tame Your Technology and Get More Sleep

Electronic tools are incredible. They can enhance communications, build relationships, and increase time effectiveness. Electronic tools can also replace true communication with information overload, damage relationships, and overwhelm our day. Electronic tools are vital and valuable, but they can also become vampires sucking our vital time and energy. Is it time you put them down […]

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Use February’s Bonus Day for R & R Time

Since 2012 is the year of Heather and my 35th wedding anniversary, we’ve been living out one of our dreams with a 30 day cruise that left San Diego, CA on January 4 to Hawaii, through the South Pacific, and back to San Diego. There are many, many fascinating aspects to this part of the […]

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Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm … on “Good Company”

“A team of scholars led by University of Southern California management professor Theresa Welbourne discovered that investments in human resources are the strongest predictors of the survival of firms five years after an IPO…”The reason HR factors had a positive effect on longer-term performance was due to their effects on what we call ‘structural cohesion,'” […]

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Book Review of “Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era”

Good Company ties together the lessons we’re still learning from The Great Recession, and explains what’s fueling the occupy movements, shows how social responsibility and environmentalism is dramatically shifting business approaches, and identifies the rising power of customers. Good Company is an inspiring and uplifting read for those of us working to bring about a […]

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Juggling Five Balls of Life

January is the time Heather and I review the past year and refocus our vision on the years ahead. We look at family, house or home, our careers, our physical health, our financial health, community involvement, spiritual growth, and social life. We’re living out one of those visions right now on a Hawaii and South […]

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Valuable Insights from New Study on Top Companies for Leaders

The RBL Group in partnership with Aon Hewitt and Fortune magazine has just released the latest version of their “Top Companies for Leaders” study. Every few years since 2002 this study has been conducted to look at the talent management practices of the best companies around the world across hundreds of data points. 470 companies […]

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Why Organizational Change Resolutions Are Easily Broken

Over the past few decades many organizations have jumped on the change bandwagon with a long list of resolutions to change their ways and develop new habits. Here’s a partial list: Safety culture Customer centric/focus/service Teamwork Innovation Flexibility/adaptability to change Best place to work/top employer Excellence Market/industry leadership Higher employee engagement Like too many New […]

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A New Year: A New Book of Blank Pages

I used to love the sharp, fresh smell of ink and paper as I opened a new book and heard the creak of the spine cracking. Old, musty, and worn school readers gave off a sweet, warm odor that promised hours of entertainment and adventure. Books don’t seem to smell that way anymore. That’s probably […]

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Behold! A Leader is Born!

A long time reader, P.K. Seshadri, sent this “quip to enjoy and use in your future posts: An amateur photographer was invited to dinner with friends and took along a few pictures to show the hostess. She looked at the photos and commented ‘These are very good! You must have a good camera.’ He didn’t […]

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Three Core Questions to Start Your New Year

Happy New Year!! May this be your best one yet! The start of a new year is an excellent time to renew and refocus ourselves, our teams, and our organizations. It’s an essential part of centering or grounding ourselves. In The Tao of Leadership: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching Adapted for a New Age, John […]

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Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm on… Recognition, Appreciation, and Celebration

“The most neglected form of compensation is the six-letter word thanks.” – Robert Townsend, former Amex and Avis executive and author of Up the Organization “What we’ve found is that exceptional leaders lead with gratitude, they pause to feel and express it first, because they have discovered that this is an essential way to improve […]

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‘Tis the Season for Recognition, Appreciation, and Celebration

After another epic global feat, Santa must now be taking the pause that refreshes! The Holiday Season should be that critical pause for all of us. This is the time of year for family, friends, and celebrations. It’s a great time to strengthen our gratitude skills as we look back at all we’ve accomplished and […]

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